\n<\/p>\n
Parents have spent years trying to keep their kids off social media, so some kids headed to the one place no adult would think to look for them: NPR.<\/p>\n
On this week\u2019s \u201cThis American Life<\/a>,\u201d host Ira Glass tells the story of the team behind NPR\u2019s podcast \u201cWild Card,\u201d who noticed a flood of baffling comments under their Spotify episodes last fall. A producer assumed the bizarre abbreviations and indecipherable emojis were bot traffic and shared screenshots in NPR\u2019s Slack. They then reported the posts to Spotify.<\/p>\n But Hannah Chin, an audio producer and Gen Z colleague, took one look at the screenshots and recognized, almost immediately by Glass\u2019s telling, that these weren\u2019t bots. They were likely middle schoolers who were too young for social media, running a group chat in the comments of the podcast. (Perhaps someone at NPR should have grokked this sooner: it spotted kids doing the same thing on TED Radio Hour<\/a> show last year.)<\/p>\n As for why NPR in particular, when Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask, he was given the kind of unvarnished answer that a middle schooler would give: \u201cUm, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn\u2019t have many comments.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI tell you, buddy,\u201d responded Glass, who has hosted \u201cThis American Life\u201d for three decades, \u201cI do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n